Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces (DVD)

Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces (1990) is a bittersweet portrait of a boy’s sexual awakening. Shot in Tunisia by renowned filmmaker Fe?rid Boughedir (A Summer in La Goulette, Zizou and the Arab Spring), this charming and erotically adventurous coming- of-age drama follows inquisitive thirteen-year-old Noura (Selim Boughedir, the director’s nephew) as he discovers the opposite sex. His eyes are opened to his own sexual desires when he visits the local Turkish bathhouse with his mother. Gazing upon the array of unclothed women, Noura begins to experience his first pangs of longing. Soon enough he risks expulsion out of the baths and back onto the streets.
A sensitive, comical look at growing up, Boughedir’s film is also a rich, vibrant portrait of Halfaouine, a neighborhood in Tunis. It is from its variety of colorful and eccentric characters that Noura learns the complicated, often hypocritical ways of adulthood.